M.

“To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels—this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth.”
― Edith Stein, The Hidden Life: Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Text

“No cabe duda de que el contraataque más exuberante lanzado por escritor alguno contra la reducción del lenguaje es el de James Joyce. Después de Shakespeare y de Burton, la literatura no había conocido semejante goloso de las palabras. Como si se hubiera dado cuenta de que la ciecnia había arrebatado al lenguaje muchas de sus antiguas posesiones, de sus colonias periféricas, Joyce quiso anexionarle una nuevo reino subterráneo. El Ulises pesca en su red luminosa la confusión viva de la vida inconsciente; Finnegan´s Wake destruye los bastiones del sueño, Joyce, como nadie había después de Milton, devuelve al oído inglés la vasta magnificiencia de su ancestro. Comanda grandes batallones de palabras, recluta nuevas palabras hace tiempo olvidadas u oxidadas, llama a filas otras palabras nuevas convocadas por las necesidades de la imaginación.”
― George Steiner

“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“I think of when I was in high school in the 1940s: the white girls got their hair crinkled up by chemicals and heat so it would curl, and the black girls got their hair mashed flat by chemicals and heat so it wouldn’t curl. Home perms hadn’t been invented yet, and a lot of kids couldn’t afford these expensive treatments, so they were wretched because they couldn’t follow the rules, the rules of beauty.

Beauty always has rules. It’s a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and don’t care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination